By Neil Hobden
When I went through a divorce, nearly 20 years ago, I was pretty blasé about it. Give me three months, I remember saying to my brother, and I’ll be fine. I’ve never forgotten his response: “Yes, it will be three,” he said, “but years, not months.”
His words have stuck with me ever since because he was absolutely right; it did take about three years for me to recover fully from the divorce. And that very personal experience has helped me a great deal in my profession.
A lot of male clients are quick to tell me about their new girlfriend and where the relationship is heading. It’s a typical male thing – to flick a switch and move from one relationship to another. It’s the way I thought, too. What you don’t realise at the time is that divorce isn’t just a practical enterprise – sorting out the house, the car, the savings and so on. It’s also about feelings; and even if you think you have a grip on your own emotions, there’s another person involved and you have to deal with their feelings too.
So, what I know from experience is that while it might be possible to resolve the practical aspects of a divorce in three months, the emotional ripples will still be evident several years later.
The advice I give to male clients who think their new girlfriend is The One is that, however exciting and wonderful the romance might be, it will probably be the girlfriend after the girlfriend after this who becomes a long-term, and hopefully life-long, partner. That doesn’t mean they should ditch the new woman – just that it’s unnecessary and unwise to make any firm commitments, such as setting up home together, at such an early stage. If you haven’t sorted out one full-on relationship, how can you take on another?
I recommend people give themselves time and space. It might sound clichéd, but divorce is an opportunity to step back and reinvent yourself. I had seven years as a born-again single man, during my 30s, before I married again. I now have a lovely second wife and 11-year-old twin daughters.
The way I met my second wife is also something I am able to share with clients who fear they’ll never find love again. I met plenty of women, but in the wrong places, before a friend suggested I tried The Times’ Encounters column. He’d tried it himself because it was discreet, so I gave it a go – and the rest, as they say, is history. My wife and I lived only ten miles apart, but because our work took us in opposite directions every day, we wouldn’t otherwise have met. When we did, however, we discovered not only did we share the same values and interests, but our fathers had attended the same Oxford college and knew each other! So, after seven years as a single man, within 18 months I was married again and had a family.
It is for reasons such as this that divorce isn’t all doom and gloom: it really can, and does, throw up new opportunities. It helps you reassess your life in all sorts of areas and makes you think about what is really important. What I often say to clients is that divorce allows you to keep the best bits of your “old” life and junk the rest.
What matters when you go through a divorce is that it – in all its manifestations – gets sorted properly so that you come out of it in the right place. And that means taking things slowly rather than trying to gallop through it. It’s not easy to do, but accept that you’ve taken a battering and are going to feel vulnerable for some time. Resolve to use that time wisely by looking at ways to make changes – getting fit or altering your habits – so that you like yourself a lot more than perhaps you did before.
- Neil is a partner at Benussi & Co